Everything Is an Afterthought: the Life and Writings of Paul Nelson

Paul Nelson was, according to Bob Dylan, “a folk-music scholar” who later wrote criticism at Rolling Stone as the last in a great tradition of record-review editors that included Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, and Greil Marcus. But in 1982, Nelson walked away from it all — Rolling Stone, his friends, and rock ’n’ roll. By the time he died in his New York City apartment in 2006 at the age of 70, almost everything he’d written had been relegated to back issues of old music magazines. With Paul Nelson’s posthumous blessing, Kevin Avery spent four years researching and writing Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writing of Paul Nelson. This unique anthology-biography compiles Nelson’s best works (some of it previously unpublished) while also providing a vivid account of his private and public lives. Avery interviewed almost 100 of Paul Nelson’s friends, family, and colleagues, including several of the artists about whom he’d written.